Vroom! Vroom! Vanishing Point has many a loyal fan - excited devotees jumped to buy earlier
releases on laserdisc, no matter how bad they were. This Fox disc is excellent for quality, with
a stereo remix and an added, longer English version.

But it's still a silly, pretentious movie, one of the many faux-ethereal "mind blowers"
of its time that aspired to importance through a combination of incoherence and pandering
commercialism. To many, it's the perfect combo of elements: antisocial hero, road-racing mania,
rock music. It's dated theme is a vague grudge against that universal foe, The Establishment.

Synopsis:

Pill-popping car delivery driver Kowalski (Barry Newman) shuttles back and forth
between San Francisco and Denver without as much as a break for fast nap. With a handful of uppers
from his dealer Jake (Lee Weaver) he starts out for the coast with the Colorado, Utah, and Nevada
highway patrols in hot pursuit. But he avoids them all, thanks to the help of an old prospector
(Dean Jagger), a hippie biker and his nude girlfriend (Timothy Scott and Gilda Texter) and
especially the broadcast urgings of Super Soul (Cleavon Little), a blind DeeJay.

It's almost as if Richard Sarafian and Guillermo Cain were challenged to come up with a surefire
counterculture hit that could strike gold the way Easy Rider had. Vanishing Point is
a road movie, mostly action and light on the dialogue. It's about a pointless road race against
a clock, using a surreal tone to nullify every incongruity and cliché. Kowalski is
addicted to two kinds of speed, and perhaps the warped plotline can be justified as being partly from
his distorted point of view. Women appear like visions out of the desert. A gas station attendant
is just like (or is) the girl he rescued from being raped by his partner when he used to be a cop.
Another female conjures up visions of the surfer girl (cue romantic flashbacks) he lost to the
deep blue see (cue lonely surfboard washing ashore). A final vision, seen only in the English vision,
is a sultry hitchhiker (Charlotte Rampling) who seems to be a personal hallucination.

Kowalski no longer has any values, you see. They've been stripped away by Vietnam, the corrupt LAPD, and
his rotten luck with love. He doesn't sleep anymore but instead throws himself into his work like
a Joe Paycheck gone wild, oblivious to the world around him.

This leads to the reels and reels of car chase footage. It's the real content of the film, and is expertly
shot. It's somewhat credible - this is before ridiculous Dukes of Hazzard-style stunts.
But the kind of punishment Kowalski metes out to his white Dodge Challenger is still more than enough
to ruin it. He's supposed to be delivering the new car to a customer in another state, but he
ruins it several times over. 1

Sorry to get moral all over the place (I'll clean it up later), but even when Savant was a 19 year-old
longhair, Vanishing Point was just all wrong. Kowalski uses his car as a deadly weapon and
tries to kill pursuing cops in cars and motorcycles. He causes and abets several potentially
deadly accidents. At one point the cops say he's only wanted for misdemeanors, which is laughable after
all the mayhem. The deadly trap laid for him by the California Highway fuzz is more than justified.

Of course, Kowalski's death wish is so fashionably acute, they needn't have gone to the trouble. He
rushes eagerly to his doom. He's set up as a mythological hero, stopping to pose against the
rising sun. He's lauded, serenaded and extolled by his personal cheering section on the radio (a
wonderfully frantic Cleavon Little). Women throw themselves at him, even a nude dirt bike rider who
comes on like a desert nymph. What we really have here is an attractive, imbecilic fantasy for young
males who daydream that freedom is outracing the police in fast cars and being pursued by exotic women. 2

Shot in long takes free of editing or effects manipulation, the mad highway chases were the best
yet in 1971. A road-film subgenre of exploitation films involving violence and cars sprang up,
and through the 70s we were inundated with basically inane pictures like Crazy Mary, Dirty
Larry, Gone in 60 Seconds and Death Race 2000. Burt Reynolds petered away his
mid-career promise in a series of chase films. At least Vanishing Point is near the start
of a questionable pack, and not an imitator.

The cast isn't particularly convincing. TV star Barry Newman just looks vacant and blank, which is
as good a way as any to play this non-character. Dean Jagger's desert dog is a nod to loner
individualism, perhaps representing Kowalski's future if he were to knuckle under and play possum
to The Establishment. Severn Darden seemed to be in every counterculture film ever made, and here
he has a short bit as a hucksterish preacher called J. Hovah (big joke). Delaney & Bonnie & Friends
play his gospel music group, with Rita Coolidge (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) prominent among
the singers. Karl Swenson is an unlikely mechanic, and cadaverous Anthony James (In the Heat of the
Night) a perverted hitchhiker. Timothy Scott (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid) is Kowalski's
hippie friend who recons the trap set for him by the cops.

Fox's DVD of Vanishing Point has assembled a package that will please this car-crazy
fantasy's many fans. Side B of the double-sided disc has at least one new scene not used for the
U.S. release, the one with Charlotte Rampling that everyone's heard of but never seen before. It's
not good, but that won't matter. Director Richard C. Sarafian's rambling but nostalgic commentary
idolizes the late cameraman John Alonzo, who he feels is responsible for giving the picture it's
superior visual style. He describes a cheap production by a devoted crew, and only once or twice
lets down his guard, almost admitting that it's a commercial trifle. But he has
interesting things to say all the way through even if he doesn't even hint at what it's all
supposed to mean. Everytime he goes in that direction, he becomes as vague as the movie itself.

A trailer and a TV spot are offered as well.

Vanishing Point is a lot of hyped-up, irresponsible, faux-arty fun. It was tentatively
considered deep for a short time when new (I remember the UCLA Bruin review comparing its time-structure
and open-endedness to 2001) but was never competition for the really intriguing road picture
of '71,
Two Lane Blacktop.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,Vanishing Pointrates:Movie: Good - or Fair +, but Excellent if you're a chase film nut.Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Richard C. Sarafian commentary; 2nd longer U.K version on 2nd side of
flipper disc.Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: March 19, 2004

Footnote:

1.In his commentary,
Sarafian acknowledges that the car could never stand up to the off-road punishment it receives.
The shoot wrecked seven of them.Return

2.I suppose that's better than modern video-game daydreams - young
boys now surely fantasize about killing hundreds of people with guns or light sabers or Matrix
super-powers, as much as they do about sex.Return